Pub Date : 2024-04-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.167
Hérica Valladares
The Sandal-Binder Aphrodite, a witty variation on Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, is one of the most frequently reproduced sculptural types in Greco-Roman art. Created in a variety of materials throughout the Mediterranean, extant versions of this iconography show the goddess in the act of tying (or possibly untying) her sandal. Although a large number of these works of art date between the first and fourth century CE, most studies on the Sandal-Binder have approached it primarily as an expression of Hellenistic Greek artistic trends. The present study shifts our attention away from the cultural milieu of the Sandal-Binder’s creation to that of its reception. Two well-preserved examples—one from a house in Pompeii and the other from London—attest to the process of translating or adapting this sensual image of Aphrodite to a Roman ideological framework. In both cases, it is through the language of body adornment that this transformation is achieved: while the example from Pompeii (a marble statuette adorned with gold paint) shows the goddess wearing contemporary jewelry and clothing, the diminutive silver figurine from London is part of a fashionable hairpin that points to the dissemination of imperial hairstyles in Rome’s remotest province. By calling attention to their design and function, this essay highlights the complex polysemy of Roman Sandal-Binders and the powerful messages they communicated to a diverse audience of viewers both at the heart of the empire and in the provinces.
绑檀香木的阿佛洛狄忒是普拉克西特莱斯(Praxiteles)的《克尼多斯的阿佛洛狄忒》(Aphrodite of Knidos)的一个诙谐变体,是希腊罗马艺术中最常被复制的雕塑类型之一。在整个地中海地区,该雕像以各种材料制作,现存的版本都表现了女神正在系(或可能是解开)凉鞋的动作。尽管这些艺术品中的大量作品创作于公元一世纪到四世纪之间,但大多数关于檀香捆扎器的研究主要将其作为希腊化时期希腊艺术潮流的一种表现形式。本研究将我们的注意力从檀香粘合剂创作的文化环境转移到它的接受环境上。两件保存完好的作品--一件来自庞贝的一座房子,另一件来自伦敦--证明了这一感性的阿佛洛狄忒形象在罗马意识形态框架下的转化或改编过程。在这两件作品中,这种转变都是通过身体装饰语言实现的:庞贝古城的作品(一个用金色颜料装饰的大理石雕像)展示了女神佩戴现代珠宝和服装的形象,而伦敦出土的银质小雕像则是时尚发卡的一部分,表明帝国发型在罗马最偏远的省份得到了传播。这篇文章通过呼吁人们关注它们的设计和功能,突出了罗马檀香夹的复杂多义性,以及它们在帝国中心和外省向不同观众传达的强大信息。
{"title":"Translating Aphrodite: The Sandal-Binder in Two Roman Contexts","authors":"Hérica Valladares","doi":"10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.167","url":null,"abstract":"The Sandal-Binder Aphrodite, a witty variation on Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, is one of the most frequently reproduced sculptural types in Greco-Roman art. Created in a variety of materials throughout the Mediterranean, extant versions of this iconography show the goddess in the act of tying (or possibly untying) her sandal. Although a large number of these works of art date between the first and fourth century CE, most studies on the Sandal-Binder have approached it primarily as an expression of Hellenistic Greek artistic trends. The present study shifts our attention away from the cultural milieu of the Sandal-Binder’s creation to that of its reception. Two well-preserved examples—one from a house in Pompeii and the other from London—attest to the process of translating or adapting this sensual image of Aphrodite to a Roman ideological framework. In both cases, it is through the language of body adornment that this transformation is achieved: while the example from Pompeii (a marble statuette adorned with gold paint) shows the goddess wearing contemporary jewelry and clothing, the diminutive silver figurine from London is part of a fashionable hairpin that points to the dissemination of imperial hairstyles in Rome’s remotest province. By calling attention to their design and function, this essay highlights the complex polysemy of Roman Sandal-Binders and the powerful messages they communicated to a diverse audience of viewers both at the heart of the empire and in the provinces.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140764090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay promotes affective engagement with the texts we read, arguing that we should attend both to recognizing emotion within the texts and to allowing ourselves to feel emotion as we read. The essay thus aligns itself with contemporary theories of non-hermeneutic or surface reading. The argument is illustrated specifically by the relationship of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) to the emotion of anger. The transcripts of the Council of Carthage, held in 411, show an eruption of anger on Augustine’s part. The essay then traces his thinking on anger through various texts, notably the City of God, the Augustinian Rule, and the personal letters to Nebridius. Using the reflections on anger of the contemporary philosopher Agnes Callard, I argue that Augustine saw anger as a unique type of moral problem, something that, once experienced, was ineradicable and distorted a sense of justice and order. It is only through an emotionally engaged reading that such a position is perceptible.
{"title":"Feeling for Augustine","authors":"Catherine Conybeare","doi":"10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.1","url":null,"abstract":"This essay promotes affective engagement with the texts we read, arguing that we should attend both to recognizing emotion within the texts and to allowing ourselves to feel emotion as we read. The essay thus aligns itself with contemporary theories of non-hermeneutic or surface reading. The argument is illustrated specifically by the relationship of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) to the emotion of anger. The transcripts of the Council of Carthage, held in 411, show an eruption of anger on Augustine’s part. The essay then traces his thinking on anger through various texts, notably the City of God, the Augustinian Rule, and the personal letters to Nebridius. Using the reflections on anger of the contemporary philosopher Agnes Callard, I argue that Augustine saw anger as a unique type of moral problem, something that, once experienced, was ineradicable and distorted a sense of justice and order. It is only through an emotionally engaged reading that such a position is perceptible.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140779812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this paper I consider ways in which seawater––both on its surface and in its depths––opens up alternative forms of thought and expression in Homer, especially with respect to the body. By tracking the relationship between body and simile as it is mediated by the surface of the sea, I argue that water emerges as an especially mobile and adaptive medium for expressing the transformation that takes place between self and simile in Homer. In the Iliad, similes are well-known for bringing weather, waves, and other aspects of the natural environment into the poem, whereas in the Odyssey those aspects more often introduce similes of their own. I offer a reading of the shipwreck scene in Odyssey 5 to suggest that the body’s struggle to stay afloat is matched there, on a formal level, by the role of waves in drawing simile and body to the sea’s surface. I then address a different kind of figurative language (closer to metaphor and associated with grief) that takes place in the depths, through readings of scenes in Books 18 and 24 of the Iliad and Archilochus fragment 13.
{"title":"Homer and the Simile at Sea","authors":"Alex Purves","doi":"10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.97","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.97","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I consider ways in which seawater––both on its surface and in its depths––opens up alternative forms of thought and expression in Homer, especially with respect to the body. By tracking the relationship between body and simile as it is mediated by the surface of the sea, I argue that water emerges as an especially mobile and adaptive medium for expressing the transformation that takes place between self and simile in Homer. In the Iliad, similes are well-known for bringing weather, waves, and other aspects of the natural environment into the poem, whereas in the Odyssey those aspects more often introduce similes of their own. I offer a reading of the shipwreck scene in Odyssey 5 to suggest that the body’s struggle to stay afloat is matched there, on a formal level, by the role of waves in drawing simile and body to the sea’s surface. I then address a different kind of figurative language (closer to metaphor and associated with grief) that takes place in the depths, through readings of scenes in Books 18 and 24 of the Iliad and Archilochus fragment 13.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140756482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
All parts of Heraclitus’ cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs (“biomasses”) cycle endlessly through physical changes in sweeping patterns (“biorhythms”) that are reflected in the dynamic rhythms of Heraclitus’ own thought and language. These natural processes are best examined at a more-than-human level that exceeds individuation, stable identity, rational comprehension, and linguistic capture. B62 (“mortals immortals”), one of Heraclitus’ most perplexing fragments, models these processes in a spectacular fashion: it describes the imbrication not only of humans and gods but of cosmic masses more generally, and its language mimics the natural relations that it names, or rather intimates through its grammatical and syntactical indeterminacy. The remaining fragments amplify the uncertainties and the exhilarations of Heraclitus’ worldview along the same lines. His approach to nature raises urgent questions about how human beings fit into the cosmos, not least by challenging our intuitive conceptions of life and death, our material makeup, and our entanglements with our natural surroundings. In doing so, he provides vital lessons for contemporary ecological awareness, and proves to be an unexpected ally.
{"title":"Life Cycles beyond the Human: Biomass and Biorhythms in Heraclitus","authors":"James I. Porter","doi":"10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.50","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.50","url":null,"abstract":"All parts of Heraclitus’ cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs (“biomasses”) cycle endlessly through physical changes in sweeping patterns (“biorhythms”) that are reflected in the dynamic rhythms of Heraclitus’ own thought and language. These natural processes are best examined at a more-than-human level that exceeds individuation, stable identity, rational comprehension, and linguistic capture. B62 (“mortals immortals”), one of Heraclitus’ most perplexing fragments, models these processes in a spectacular fashion: it describes the imbrication not only of humans and gods but of cosmic masses more generally, and its language mimics the natural relations that it names, or rather intimates through its grammatical and syntactical indeterminacy. The remaining fragments amplify the uncertainties and the exhilarations of Heraclitus’ worldview along the same lines. His approach to nature raises urgent questions about how human beings fit into the cosmos, not least by challenging our intuitive conceptions of life and death, our material makeup, and our entanglements with our natural surroundings. In doing so, he provides vital lessons for contemporary ecological awareness, and proves to be an unexpected ally.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140777559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper is an attempt to think through paranoia’s epistemic and affective features, which pervade both the worldview presented in Senecan tragedy and the inner life of many of its protagonists. Drawing upon recent literary-critical work, I argue that paranoia is temporally and epistemically ambivalent: subjects simultaneously attempt to “get ahead” of a looming cataclysm—looking to the future in an attempt to avert disaster—while inevitably “falling behind,” failing to predict or preempt the future in time to protect themselves. Much of Senecan tragedy plays out paranoia’s future-oriented vigilance on the formal level. Foreshadowing, allusions, and meta-literary flourishes serve to render both readers and characters hyperaware of the earth-shattering horrors to come; however, in doing so, they also reveal that this forward-oriented bracing only serves to dredge up negative affect in advance. By contrast, I argue that Seneca’s Phoenissae thematizes in the character of Oedipus not only paranoia’s future-looking vigilance but also its inherent lagging, the failure to know and act in advance. These elements of slowness, stuckness, and delay open a space for stillness, relief, and intimacy, even within a narrative which hurtles toward cataclysm.
{"title":"Oedipus Haerens: Paranoid Lagging in Seneca’s Phoenissae","authors":"Chiara Graf","doi":"10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.19","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is an attempt to think through paranoia’s epistemic and affective features, which pervade both the worldview presented in Senecan tragedy and the inner life of many of its protagonists. Drawing upon recent literary-critical work, I argue that paranoia is temporally and epistemically ambivalent: subjects simultaneously attempt to “get ahead” of a looming cataclysm—looking to the future in an attempt to avert disaster—while inevitably “falling behind,” failing to predict or preempt the future in time to protect themselves. Much of Senecan tragedy plays out paranoia’s future-oriented vigilance on the formal level. Foreshadowing, allusions, and meta-literary flourishes serve to render both readers and characters hyperaware of the earth-shattering horrors to come; however, in doing so, they also reveal that this forward-oriented bracing only serves to dredge up negative affect in advance. By contrast, I argue that Seneca’s Phoenissae thematizes in the character of Oedipus not only paranoia’s future-looking vigilance but also its inherent lagging, the failure to know and act in advance. These elements of slowness, stuckness, and delay open a space for stillness, relief, and intimacy, even within a narrative which hurtles toward cataclysm.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140780689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.124
Molly Swetnam-Burland
The Fasti Antiates Ministrorum Domus Augustae, a large inscription associated with the imperial villa at Antium, is best known for its iteration of the Augustan calendar. In this article, I reassess the fasti in their entirety, focusing on their manner of display and social function. I place special emphasis on the section of the inscription, largely overlooked, that contains the annual records of magistrates who led the voluntary association that commissioned the inscription, a detailed record of two decades of local history. The association revealed in these records worked to bestow honors on its members, offering them prestige within and beyond the household, and also acted to censure them. Because the fasti identify most magistrates by job title, they also provide invaluable information about the villa’s workforce, composed of enslaved people and freedmen; the document provides a valuable counterpoint to other testimonia for occupations, largely funerary. Manual laborers and domestics appear with greater frequency in the fasti than they do in occupational inscriptions from funerary contexts, while administrators, abundant in funerary contexts, form a minority. Importantly, the magistrates’ list reveals that the association was a group in which the “sub-clerical grades” of imperial slaves and freedmen could accrue prestige and wield authority as readily as their overseers. In the community reflected in the fasti, power derived not from job status within a workplace hierarchy, but from social standing among peers—acquired and maintained (or lost) over decades of service.
Fasti Antiates Ministrorum Domus Augustae 是与安提乌姆(Antium)帝王别墅有关的大型铭文,因其对奥古斯都历法的演绎而闻名于世。在这篇文章中,我将重新评估整个碑文,重点关注其展示方式和社会功能。我特别强调了碑文中大部分被忽视的部分,其中包含地方行政长官的年度记录,他们领导着委托撰写碑文的自愿协会,详细记录了二十年的地方历史。这些记录所揭示的协会致力于为其成员授予荣誉,为他们在家族内外提供声望,同时也对他们进行指责。由于 fasti 按职称标明了大多数地方行政官的身份,它们还提供了有关别墅劳动力(由被奴役者和自由人组成)的宝贵信息;该文件为其他职业(主要是殡葬业)的证词提供了宝贵的反证。与墓葬中的职业铭文相比,体力劳动者和家政人员在 fasti 中出现的频率更高,而在墓葬中大量出现的行政人员却只占少数。重要的是,行政长官名单显示,在这个团体中,"次等级 "的帝国奴隶和自由民可以像他们的监工一样轻松地积累声望和行使权力。在 fasti 所反映的群体中,权力不是来自工作场所等级制度中的工作地位,而是来自同侪之间的社会地位--在数十年的服务中获得并保持(或失去)。
{"title":"Working for the Emperor at Antium: Profession and Prestige in the Fasti Antiates Ministrorum Domus Augustae","authors":"Molly Swetnam-Burland","doi":"10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2024.43.1.124","url":null,"abstract":"The Fasti Antiates Ministrorum Domus Augustae, a large inscription associated with the imperial villa at Antium, is best known for its iteration of the Augustan calendar. In this article, I reassess the fasti in their entirety, focusing on their manner of display and social function. I place special emphasis on the section of the inscription, largely overlooked, that contains the annual records of magistrates who led the voluntary association that commissioned the inscription, a detailed record of two decades of local history. The association revealed in these records worked to bestow honors on its members, offering them prestige within and beyond the household, and also acted to censure them. Because the fasti identify most magistrates by job title, they also provide invaluable information about the villa’s workforce, composed of enslaved people and freedmen; the document provides a valuable counterpoint to other testimonia for occupations, largely funerary. Manual laborers and domestics appear with greater frequency in the fasti than they do in occupational inscriptions from funerary contexts, while administrators, abundant in funerary contexts, form a minority. Importantly, the magistrates’ list reveals that the association was a group in which the “sub-clerical grades” of imperial slaves and freedmen could accrue prestige and wield authority as readily as their overseers. In the community reflected in the fasti, power derived not from job status within a workplace hierarchy, but from social standing among peers—acquired and maintained (or lost) over decades of service.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140776093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.249
Rebecca Kosick
Across her diverse body of work, the Canadian-born poet Anne Carson repeatedly returns to the objects of her preoccupation. From Lazarus—“a person who had to die twice” (Nox)—to Herakles and countless other figures, themes, and images, Carson repeatedly reworks old ground, particularly around the unknowable divide separating the living and the dead. This essay adopts a repetitive approach to explore how H of H and The Trojan Women can be understood as in reiterative conversation with the poet’s source texts, her own work, and wider thinking on the utility of repeating ourselves.
{"title":"Repeating after Carson","authors":"Rebecca Kosick","doi":"10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.249","url":null,"abstract":"Across her diverse body of work, the Canadian-born poet Anne Carson repeatedly returns to the objects of her preoccupation. From Lazarus—“a person who had to die twice” (Nox)—to Herakles and countless other figures, themes, and images, Carson repeatedly reworks old ground, particularly around the unknowable divide separating the living and the dead. This essay adopts a repetitive approach to explore how H of H and The Trojan Women can be understood as in reiterative conversation with the poet’s source texts, her own work, and wider thinking on the utility of repeating ourselves.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139327747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.229
Laura Jansen
This essay serves as an introduction to Anne Carson’s Euripides. It discusses Carson’s ongoing engagement with the tragedian, from Grief Lessons to her latest experimental H of H Playbook and The Trojan Women: A Comic, drawing attention to Carson’s cross-pollinating approach to Euripidean tragedy and antiquity more broadly, as well as the characteristic blending of academic and artistic styles that inform her translation poetics. The introduction includes details of the themes explored in the special issue, together with summaries of the eight ‘takes’ that make up the collection.
{"title":"Introduction: On Anne Carson’s Euripides","authors":"Laura Jansen","doi":"10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.229","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.229","url":null,"abstract":"This essay serves as an introduction to Anne Carson’s Euripides. It discusses Carson’s ongoing engagement with the tragedian, from Grief Lessons to her latest experimental H of H Playbook and The Trojan Women: A Comic, drawing attention to Carson’s cross-pollinating approach to Euripidean tragedy and antiquity more broadly, as well as the characteristic blending of academic and artistic styles that inform her translation poetics. The introduction includes details of the themes explored in the special issue, together with summaries of the eight ‘takes’ that make up the collection.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139328454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.237
Laura Jansen
This piece looks into the atmospheric and catastrophic environments that punctuate H of H: storms, ice-breaks, volcanic eruptions, and nuclear explosions that give the tragic narrative an electrifying edge. It draws attention to a “chemical” poetics at the heart of Carson’s translation technique and thinking about Euripides’ play. This mannerism, also found in Euripides’s “combustible mixture of realism and extremism” (Grief Lessons, blurb), is not exclusive to H of H. It can be detected across Carson’s oeuvre – a tendency to combust the reader’s mind in ways that become a philosophy for re-reading Euripides and, more ambitiously, Carson’s own sense of the tragic.
{"title":"H of H and the Combustion of Thought","authors":"Laura Jansen","doi":"10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.237","url":null,"abstract":"This piece looks into the atmospheric and catastrophic environments that punctuate H of H: storms, ice-breaks, volcanic eruptions, and nuclear explosions that give the tragic narrative an electrifying edge. It draws attention to a “chemical” poetics at the heart of Carson’s translation technique and thinking about Euripides’ play. This mannerism, also found in Euripides’s “combustible mixture of realism and extremism” (Grief Lessons, blurb), is not exclusive to H of H. It can be detected across Carson’s oeuvre – a tendency to combust the reader’s mind in ways that become a philosophy for re-reading Euripides and, more ambitiously, Carson’s own sense of the tragic.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139327631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.293
Ian Rae
This essay examines Carson’s The Trojan Women: A Comic, a 2021 translation of Euripides illustrated by Rosanna Bruno. Carson’s subtitle, through the intersection of classical and modern senses of “the comic” as a genre, demands that the reader ask of her book: What is the place of comedy in a comic about one of the bleakest plays in the Western canon? The comic elements of The Trojan Women reframe Euripides’ narrative and underscore, in a bitter irony, the disastrous impact on the Greeks of the reconciliation of the gods Athena and Poseidon.
{"title":"Comedy in Carson’s The Trojan Women: A Comic","authors":"Ian Rae","doi":"10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2023.42.2.293","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines Carson’s The Trojan Women: A Comic, a 2021 translation of Euripides illustrated by Rosanna Bruno. Carson’s subtitle, through the intersection of classical and modern senses of “the comic” as a genre, demands that the reader ask of her book: What is the place of comedy in a comic about one of the bleakest plays in the Western canon? The comic elements of The Trojan Women reframe Euripides’ narrative and underscore, in a bitter irony, the disastrous impact on the Greeks of the reconciliation of the gods Athena and Poseidon.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139331491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}